“Stop it!” he snapped.

“I’m just trying to…” began Phantasia.

“I don’t care! Just stop doing that!”

Phantasia pulled away and frowned, then walked back over to Katrina. She looked down at the knight and back at Dante. “He did all this just to protect you?” she asked.

Katrina couldn’t help herself from blushing. Most people understood but a newcomer like Phantasia could easily get the wrong impression. “We were brought up together,” she explained before Phantasia could jump to conclusions, “He’s…like a brother to me. I know that might sound a bit strange…”

“No,” she replied, her eyes distant as if she were focusing on her own past, “It’s not strange at all…” For a few moments she stood there in silence, lost in her memories, then she was back again, a look of determination on her face.

“I want you two to escape,” she said, “I’ve decided to go back and help Bishop Wotan.”

It took Katrina by surprise and she had to take a second to make sure she’d heard her right. “Are you serious?” she asked, her hands flailing with the rattling of bracelets – a common sign of her shock, surprise or confusion.

“I am.” She turned to leave and her feet started to leave the ground as if she were swimming underwater.

“Wait.”

Dante was resting against the doorway, his posture slumped and his eyes dark. “Maybe you can use this.” He held out a palm-sized packet he’d been carrying around in his pocket. “It’s the excess explosives. I stole it before Joel could.”

Phantasia floated over, took it out of his hands and turned over in hers, unaware of the spooked expression on Dante’s face.

“This might come in handy!” she said, then smirked, twisted over and swam off down the corridor, leaving Katrina alone with Dante. She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder and led him away.

“She’s a faerie,” she said.

“Figures.” Dante stared after Phantasia for a few moments, then followed.

***

Phantasia wasn’t sure which of the day’s events concerned her more: that Godhand could commit horrible acts with such positive faith, or that Dante could strive to protect his friends with such dark power. The boundaries of good and evil, of light and darkness were starting to blur in her head, forming a misty, impenetrable grey. She had to confront the Patriarch to find out for herself just what the true definitions were, if they existed at all.

There was just a floor left between her and the audience chamber when the atmosphere shifted balance. While she still had the chance, she left the material explosives in a safe place and made herself incorporeal, her physical clothes slipping off to be replaced by what she thought was more fitting attire.

The Patriarch’s malice, sealed tight by the magic seal, burst back to life like a supernova, spreading tendrils of darkness whipping across the streams of mana. Phantasia increased her ascent, sensing the condensing of the Patriarch’s power to a focal point, like a devilish beast breathing in before unleashing a torrent of flames. There was no doubt he was going to attack! Not Wotan, though, but the youthful aura of Apeliotes, the faerie sprite responsible for the magic seal, who was at that second preparing another. He wouldn’t have enough time, the Patriarch was going to…

Chapter 22
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